After a whirlwind romance leads to a failed marriage, a young woman gets another at love in Director Rachel Morrison’s romantic drama, Love of Your Life.

Morrison’s film weaves the tale of Maya, a smart, wry Boston nurse who fell in love and quickly married but the relationship fell apart. After fleeing her life in the US, she meets another man who revives her capacity for intimacy, but she is now forced to reckon with who she is, what she wants, and how to love again.

On October 10, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Morrison discussed the making of Love of Your Life during a Q&A moderated by Director Malcolm Washington (The Piano Lesson).

During the conversation, Morrison spoke about the advantages of operating the camera and using handheld herself.

“I call it my superpower. On a set, the second the Director yells ‘cut!’ whether or not they want this, a thousand people storm the castle. In the movie, the character just died, and people are checking out her hair and brushing. It’s chaos, and it takes them totally out of it. The nice thing about me operating is that I don’t have to cut. I can make small changes. I can step in and keep [star] Margaret [Qualley] in it. In a movie like this, you’re asking a lot from your actors. There’s a lot of emotional labor that they’re having to communicate. Therefore, handheld can be on a level from one to ten [to capture that]. There’s a lot of attenuation that’s happening, and you’re making very intuitive decisions to take a step forward, take a step back, go lower, go find a flare.”

Morrison’s other directorial credits include the feature The Fire Inside; episodes of The Mandalorian, American Crime Story, Hightown, The Morning Show, American Crime and Quantico; and an episode of the mini-series Homemade. Morrison was also the first woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Cinematography for her work on Dee Rees’ 2018 feature Mudbound. She has been a DGA member since 2014.